


in the beginning

by Big_Spicy_Garlean_Fucker



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Id Fic, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-30 22:30:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20104666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Big_Spicy_Garlean_Fucker/pseuds/Big_Spicy_Garlean_Fucker
Summary: consciousness is a curse





	in the beginning

**Author's Note:**

> i'm not a writer

Everyone loved him, in the beginning. Even Lahabrea.

They were fourteen of Amaurot’s brightest minds, each a blazing soul unique and precious working in tandem to maintain their society. Not a day goes by without Emet-Selch remembering, unable to escape it even in sleep. Masked faces and robed figures with their hearts alight, full of creativity and love and _life_. The Convocation’s newest member, raising their hands to show off their latest concept, his eternal joy. The glittering skyscrapers and raw energy of boundless creation zinging through the air. All of it he remembers, day after day, eon after eon. The others do not often speak it aloud – it is ever Rejoining this, Ardor that. Their minds have ever been weaker than his own. They do not even bother to resist.

They respected him, back then. He can’t remember when they stopped. Perhaps they do not care, or _cannot_ care after millenia under Zodiark’s spell. Why, then, does Emet-Selch still feel? Why does he yet maintain a mind of his own?

He remembers asking himself this many, many centuries ago. Now, he laughs aloud at the thought that he could ever _want_ to know. It does not matter, after all. Nothing does but his one purpose – bringing everyone back. He will do anything it takes to see Zodiark reformed – his own pain is a paltry curse compared to the annihilation his people threw themselves into in hope of salvation. There is no room for petty things such as feelings, for all he has lost may yet be regained if only he could _focus_ and do what needs to be done. So Emet-Selch tells himself, face cradled in white-gloved hands and back hunched like he can’t see the point in holding his head up anymore. Staring through clawed fingers at the floor, he sees not the carpet before him but a thousand thousand eyeless faces wailing for him to deliver them from this hell.

“I am here too,” he tells them, in a voice so far removed from anything this body can shape. “We suffer together, as always. But never alone.”

They continue to cry and scream and thrash in a sea of endless dark, Emet-Selch feeling the weight of every soul guarded by his own. He cares for them, these long-dead folk, fully aware that not a single one cares for him.

They all loved him in the beginning.

Now, there is just he, Lahabrea and Elidibus for those who might speak and understand each other beyond the pathetic veil of mortality. Neither of them are any flavour of conversationalist, and Emet-Selch used to mourn for how they were (he accepts it, now). Lahabrea could never keep his mouth shut, always brimming with new and fanciful ideas he just had to share with anyone who’d listen. Elidibus on the other hand could spend long hours deilberating the nature of existence with a cup of tea in hand and the purest serenity in his form, like the world around him was naught but an extended dream he could bend at will. Emet-Selch can’t remember the last time he genuinely enjoyed a conversation with either of them beyond the old days. Indeed, he has long since forsaken such things as closeness and kindness and friendship and peace. He can emulate them just fine when necessary, when the mortals and their pitiful little minds require it. But every single step is an act, one he has long since grown tired of.

He wonders if the Warrior knows how he suffers – yet another fragment of his eternal joy working against him for the good of their misbegotten realm. If killing them would bring about the Rejoining at last – if only he had the strength. He cannot consider their beautiful, fractured soul the broken mirror of his own and ever think to destroy it. They are one of his people too, after all, even so sundered as they are. They do not remember, they never have in all the eons following the Calamity. But Emet-Selch does.

He has loved them since the beginning.


End file.
